The Patriot’s Progress by Henry Williamson

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Reviews

From Goodreads:
Very unexpected memoir/novel of WW I — totally different from the many I have read. Five “phases” each are one long paragraph — not conventional in any way. “Stream of consciousness” comes to mind, but some of it is more “stream of impressions” — hard to describe, other than to say it’s all immensely powerful. Talk about “fog of war” — this is “black night of war.”

“Very unexpected” because when I ordered it I thought it was a straight memoir. Not quite!

Call it 4.5 stars. I’ll give it 5 stars for impact and 4 stars for “enjoyability,” whatever that is.

I did like it better than Henri Barbusse’s “Under Fire” semi-autobiographical novel, which is said to be the first novel to come out of WW I (published while to war was still in progress).

From the New York City Tribune (Herschel Brickell) 20 July 1930:
“Patriot’s Progress” is the attempt of a finished literary artist who has full command of his medium, and who was in the mess himself, to portray Everyman at War. [Takes reader through the tale.]
The undercurrent that lies beneath the whole book seems to mean that wiser men than John bullock have no business to let him and his kind go dumbly and uncomprehendingly into wars. . . . Mr Williamson’s battle scenes are extraordinarily good. . . .
[“The Patriot’s Progress”] will be of especial interest to those who know the other work of its author, because it shows him in a changed mood as well as a changed manner. He has suppressed that sensitivity . . . that makes him seem sentimental at times; he writes with feelings so deeply harrowed, . . . and the effect is all the stronger.

From The Nation, 17 September 1930; short and to the point:
Mr. Williamson, in his luminous descriptive prose, has written a second fine war book. It is the story of a young English private who might well have been named Everyman. For we are not shown the inner life of John Bullock in those respects wherein he differed from his fellows but we recognise him at once because he typifies his fellows. The reader follows Everysoldier from the time he joins up with high hopes and inflamed spirits on through his terrible ordeals and into the Valley of the Shadow [note the nod to Bunyan and the Bible] of agony to his emergence, crippled, forever handicapped. The story is short, graphic and haunting. It belongs among the best of the increasing number of war memorials in literature.

Oakland Tribune California, 13 July 1930:
Henry Williamson Increases His Stature With “The Private’s Progress,” Courageous and Candid Book of a War Private
. . . His use of abruptly broken sentences, his forceful punctuation, tell so much more than even his own precise and brilliant verbage could otherwise. . . .
If more such narratives of the war are to be written, let them be by those of the greatness of soul and the literary equipment of Williamson.

 

Book cover with airplane

“WE” by Charles Lindbergh

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If you or your students want to download directly from this web site to an Amazon device, you can use the mobi format below. When you find the mobi file in ES File Explorer, it will then open in the Kindle app on your tablet. If you download an epub file to your Amazon tablet, it will also open if you have an app such as Overdrive on your tablet. The Kindle app offers an excellent reading experience to start with. Overdrive may need some customization of font size.

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This is the autobiography of the famous flier, Charles A. Lindbergh, written almost immediately after his famous flight across the Atlantic Ocean from New York to Paris on May 20–21, 1927. This historic flight by Charles Lindbergh took him from being a little-known US Postal Service Air Mail pilot and made him into one of the most famous if not the most famous person in the world. The main impetus for the flight was the $25,000 Orteig Prize offered by the French-born New York hotelier Raymond Orteig. He offered the prize to be awarded to the pilot of the first successful nonstop flight made in either direction between New York City and Paris.

The book, which was also soon translated into most major languages, remained at the top of best-seller lists well into 1928, with more than 650,000 copies sold in the first year, and earned Lindbergh more than $250,000. The book’s great commercial success was considerably aided by its publication coinciding with the start of his three-month tour of the United States in the Spirit on behalf of the Daniel Guggenheim Fund for the Promotion of Aeronautics.

The nation became obsessed with Lindbergh during the tour in which he was seen in person by more than 30 million Americans, a quarter of the nation’s then population. No other author before or since ever had such an extensive, highly publicized tour that helped promote a book than did Lindbergh’s “We” of himself and the Spirit during their 22,350-mile tour of the US. He visited 82 cities in all 48 states during which the nation’s nascent aviation superhero delivered 147 speeches and rode 1,290 miles in parades.

Toward the Flame: A War Diary by Hervey Allen

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As you may know, Amazon has changed to the epub format to use with the Send-to-Kindle program. A great feature of the Send-to-Kindle program is that the file will go directly to your Library folder, and not have to be searched for in ES File Explorer or another app. If you use the mobi format in Send-to-Kindle, you will now get an error message. You can see instructions about Send to Kindle at https://www.amazon.com/gp/sendtokindle/email.

If you or your students want to download directly from this web site to  an Amazon device, you can use the mobi format below. When you find the mobi file  in ES File Explorer, it will then open in the Kindle app on your tablet. If you download an epub file to your Amazon tablet, it will also open if you have an app such as Overdrive on your tablet. The Kindle app offers an excellent reading experience to start with. Overdrive may need some customization of font size.

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Reviews of the Print Edition

“TOWARD THE FLAME is written in admirable and simple prose throughout … an important record.”—Saturday Review

“Filled with drama and humor. … It is unforgettable and beautiful. It has the marks of a classic.”—Bookman

“The main comfort, as seen by Mr. Allen, is that on the one hand a certain disregard for death comes from familiarity with the worst that death can do. . . . On the other hand, life, shortened in prospect, increases in intensity. . . . [One has] a quite special regard for the scholar in arms, the man who does his duty coolly and intrepidly, though his intelligence knows other allegiances.” —The New York Times

More Recent Reviews

From Goodreads 4.04 rating:

Considered by many to be the finest American combat memoir of the First World War, Hervey Allen’s Toward the Flame vividly chronicles the experiences of the Twenty-eighth Division in the summer of 1918. Made up primarily of Pennsylvania National Guardsmen, the Twenty-eighth Division saw extensive action on the Western Front. The story begins with Lieutenant Allen and his men marching inland from the French coast and ends with their participation in the disastrous battle for the village of Fismette. Allen was a talented observer, and the men with whom he served emerge as well-rounded characters against the horrific backdrop of the war.

From http://roadstothegreatwar-ww1.blogspot.com/2013/07/toward-flame-memoir-of-world-war-i-by.html

…Throughout his memoir Allen describes the attrition of war, especially the hideous affronts of war upon soldiers’ bodies and minds. Describing the effects of a shell burst he reports: Then we heard those awful agonized screams and cries for help that so often followed. It is impossible to make people at home understand what listening to them does to your brain. You never get rid of them again.
Allen continues his observations of the war as a semi-detached observer throughout his book and it is only toward the end that he records how his unit, a company down to less than half strength, finally comes in direct contact with the enemy. They are continually whittled down by German artillery at the battle of Fismette village, part of the Second Battle of the Marne, while the withdrawal order of an American officer is overruled by an obsessed French general. The narrative ends as Allen’s troops are overwhelmed by German flamethrowers, thus explaining the title of his memoir.

Cover of the Legend of John Brown Top Half has an image of John Brown

The Legend of John Brown: A Biography and a History by Richard Owen Boyer

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From The New York Times:
“Boyer’s book is more than a life of John Brown. It is a tapestry of the whole of American life in the generation that slid into civil war. It is a rich weave. Here is old John Quincy Adams, in his seventies, cured of his psychosomatic carbuncles by the sheer exhilaration of the struggle against the slaveowners in Congress. Here is the pro-slavery mob at Alton on the Mississippi, weeping at the sheer eloquence of the abolitionist editor, Elijah Lovejoy, but shooting him down just the same. Here is the slave rebel, Nat Turner, taunted by a Tidewater planter about his approaching execution, and answering, as John Brown himself would have answered, “Was not Christ crucified?” Read more

With Title Mississippi Notebook

Mississippi Notebook: Freedom Summer June-August 1964 by Nicholas Von Hoffman

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One of those who watched and was watched in the turbulent summer of 1964 was Chicago Daily News reporter Nicholas von Hoffman. Through ten tense weeks and over 6000 miles of dusty roads and highways, from the Delta to the piney hills to the Gulf, von Hoffman studied the state of mind of the State of Mississippi.

Mississippi Notebook is his vivid and entirely honest record of that summer, a summer that was marked by murder, violence, and intimidation on a scale that is difficult to grasp for any but those who witnessed it, or—and worse—for those who were made to suffer it.
Sometimes it is the way people talk, how they look, the small but illuminating incident overlooked in the broad sweep of the news that really tells the story and makes a complex social crisis understandable.

Such is the case with Mississippi Notebook. It is a finely detailed and deeply disturbing report on a state and its people, white and black, who are playing a major role in the greatest domestic crisis now facing the nation.